Phew, that was a bit rich, wasn’t it? I think I’ve eaten too much. I’m not sure if it was that festive sleigh-ride across the rooftops in a carriage pulled by a giant fog-breathing shark that had been tamed by the sweet song of a cryogenically frozen maiden that did it, but I actually feel rather queasy.

Of course, Matt Smith’s first Christmas Special as the Doctor had been written with the word “Christmassy” in mind, it’s not really for old curmudgeons like me, who got more of a kick out of Michael Gambon’s miserly Kazran Sardick when he was sneering and snarling at the beginning of the episode than when he had been thoroughly heartwarmed by the end.

But there was just something so overblown about the whole thing, it reminded me of the worst excesses of the Russell T Davies era, when everything just kept getting bigger, louder, more operatic… feebler.

Writer Steven Moffat is a gifted storyteller, responsible for some of the best moments in the series’s long history, from The Empty Child in 2005 - Eccleston’s Doctor calling out: “Give me a day like this. Give me this day”, as if he had truly lived 900 years in an implacable universe - to The Big Bang earlier this year - with its stirring, swelling, “Something old, something new…” speech leading to Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond growling, “I remember you, raggedy man, and you are late for my wedding!” Fantastic.

But this. Well it started nicely. Matt Smith is such a great physical actor, almost like a dancer, his little tumble from the chimney, the way he turned his head in the armchair to announce: “I’m the ghost of Christmas past,” was just so right.

And when the shark swam into the young Kazran’s room - it must have looked amazing in Moffat’s head before it made its way onto paper; even after it had been computer generated in such a way that it wouldn’t terrify young children for months, it still looked good.

And Katherine Jenkins as a young beauty slumbering like Snow White in a tomb of ice, terrific.

But by the time she was singing to the shark, I’d had enough. I like my sharks cold-blooded, predatory, dangerous. I know it’s Christmas but what next? A cup of tea with the Cybermen? Spa day with the Daleks?

It was clear that Moffat had his tongue at least partly in cheek, and some of the advance images from the new series look set to give a whole new generation of viewers their first taste of the creeps, but that’s enough “Christmassy” for now.